Calcutta, April 14
The days of the republic of "Bangla Desh", in the form it has existed for the last three weeks, are numbered. The reported information this week of an independent government, headed by Shaikh Mujibur Rahman, leader of the Awami League, cannot alter this fact. The struggle for secession from the western part of Pakistan must go underground, if it is to continue.

The rebel government. of which Mr. Tazuddin Ahmed, general secretary of the Awami League, is named as Prime Minister, supposedly has its headquarters at Chuadanga, in Kushtia province, close to the Indian border. This, in fact, is one of the few towns left in which the Awami League and their followers are still in undisputed control.

There is no evidence, however, that any members of the new government are actually in Chuadanga. Sheikh Mujib himself is not at large, probably under arrest and possibly dead. The whereabouts of many of his ministerial colleagues is uncertain.

None the less, tomorrow. which is new year's day in the Bengali calendar, the government is expected to make a formal proclamation of its aims and principles. It seems doubtful, under the circumstances, whether this can have much more than symbolic value.

Indian newspapers claim to have heard the announcement of the formation of the Bangla Desh government on monitored broadcasts of free Bengal radio. No one else, however, has heard the radio sJnce it went off the air at the end of last month.

The partisan nature of Indian reportage, in which the daily accounts of large-scale fighting and heroic resistance by gallant freedom fighters often owe more to wishful thinking than reality, does not inspire confidence in its accuracy or objectivity.

It has also been noted that certain of the opposition spokesmen in the central Indian legislature could have a tactical interest in the establishment of a Bangla Desh government. For this poses in more acute form the question of possible diplomatic recognition by India of an independent East Bengal, a potentially embarrassing matter for Mrs. Gandhi, the Prime
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Minister, who has so far limited herself to carefully phrased expressions of empathy for the Bengalis.

One of the notable gaps in Indian press coverage of the Pakistan crisis has been the absence of any attempt to investigate well-attested reports of large-scale reprisal killings of non-Bengalis, of whom there are an estimated five to eight million in East Pakistan, about 800,000 of them Bihari Muslims.

There is reliable evidence that the West Pakistan Army has been bribing some Bihari Muslims to act as spies and informers. In one town Biharis were reported to have been paid large sums of money in return for painting distinguishing marks on the houses of Awami League officials, who were later easily rounded-up and eliminated when the Army moved in.

Only some of these stories would need to be true to arouse the racial resentment felt by the Bengalis towards the Biharis, who have always formed a rather self-contained community within East Pakistan. In the emotionally-charged atmosphere now prevailing all non-Bengalis easily come to be seen as "spies" or "informers".

Some have been summarily executed, others hacked to death by mobs, still others buried alive. The extent of the killings is impossible to estimate: but, on past experience of communal massacres in Pakistan, it is likely to have been considerable. Many of the 30,000 refugees reported to have left East Bengal in the past three weeks (and now housed in camps not easily accessible to foreign journalists) are probably non-Bengalis.

It is true that the slaughter of non-Bengalis has essentially been in retaliation to the much greater brutality of the Pakistan Army. But some of the killing may have begun even before the army went in to Dacca on March 25.

It should not be forgotten that the Awami League, with its strongly Chauvinistic element, has a far from blameless record in the matter of violence towards minorities. Hindus have often suffered at their hands in the past.